Boy, there are a lot of reasons to be disgusted by (or disappointed in) John Edwards today. You can almost pick and choose the ones you want to feature. Having the affair is a moral and human failing but it's also just plain foolish. Anyone who aspires to high office in this country oughta know that there will be powerful forces out there, paying money to people who can expose this kind of thing...and I still don't get why he thought he could meet with "the other woman" at the Beverly Hilton in the middle of a press junket and not be spotted.
His confession/ apology is pretty lame, too...like he thinks if he grovels enough, someone will still give him a shot at the White House someday. Maybe he could run on a ticket with Gary Hart.
I keep getting e-mails asking me why I haven't reviewed or recommended Blake Bell's new book, Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko. There's an easy answer to that: Insufficient time to give it the thorough, attentive reading it obviously deserves. But just flipping through it and reading a hunk here and there, it's obvious that it's a very handsome book full of well-chosen Ditko art, and that Blake has done a fine job of digging out as much biographical info on his subject as is humanly possible.
Ditko is, of course, famous for being reclusive and refusing to grant interviews — a policy that makes you J.D. Salinger to some people. Those who've spoken with him lately say he is perturbed by some of the "prying" that's being done in print and on video into his life. My impression, admittedly remote (I haven't spoken to Ditko or exchanged correspondence with him in twenty years but we have mutual acquaintances) is that he's bothered less by the attention than by the conclusions and interpretations. He often declined interviews by saying "I prefer to let my work speak for itself" and is now stunned that everyone does not hear the same thing from it.
If he reads Blake's book, he will probably find plenty to disagree with, which of course doesn't mean that he's right and the book is wrong. Matter of fact, if ever there was a comic book artist whose work left itself open to disparate analysis, it's Ditko. In what I've read, Blake avoids the easy, oft-made mistake of trying to see everything as a slavish representation of something from the works of Ayn Rand. He also does a great job of reminding us just what was so great about Ditko's work when he was able to really be Steve Ditko...and that's about all I want to write about the book until I have time for a cover-to-cover read.
You can order a copy of it from Amazon by clicking here. If you look around on that page, you can probably find one of those exciting Amazon package deals where you can order Blake's Ditko book and my Kirby book together for $52.79, a discount of $0.00 from the price of buying them separately. All you save is one click but, hey, if you can save one click a day, you might avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
Joe Conason, whose reporting and analysis I'm inclined to trust as much as I trust anyone's, thinks there's something to the charge that we're in Iraq partly because the Bush administration had a memo forged in order to get us there. I'm not ready to assume this is true but it looks like there's enough evidence that it oughta be the subject of investigations and hearings and all those things we used to only do in this country when someone thought they would bring down Bill Clinton. I think what's being alleged here is a wee bit more serious than having an affair with an intern.
Here's a two-part interview (embedded one after the other in the player below) of Arthur Laurents, book writer of West Side Story and Gypsy, among others. The two parts run a total of around twenty minutes.
One of the arguments for the Death Penalty has always been that it provides a sense of justice and closure to the loved ones of the victim of a murder. This article which claims otherwise is by Donald A. McCartin (a Conservative Judge) and Mike Farrell (a Liberal actor) who happen to be friends. They used to debate the issue but now are on the same page.
August 9, 2008
